


What a Disappointment

by just_a_dram



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rhaegar lives, Arranged Marriage, F/M, Hate to Love, Jon Snow is a Targaryen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:17:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4519881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa Stark and Jon Targaryen are married and neither of them is pleased about it. Set in a world where Rhaegar lives and Jon was raised in King's Landing as a legitimized bastard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Part of the salty!teens fest that exploded on tumblr.

They say Aegon is everything a prince should be. Young and handsome with hair of silver, high spirited, and good with his sword and horse. He’s a boy from the songs come to life, as fine a son as Rhaegar could ever ask for. That’s who Sansa wishes her lord father would have arranged a marriage for her with.

Instead she’s to marry Jon Targaryen, the bastard prince.

There is nothing desirable about being kin to a bastard member of the royal family. Even less to being married to him and packed off to some crumbling castle in The Gift, and Sansa cries into her pillow at night, wondering what she ever did to deserve such a miserable fate.

Jeyne doesn’t understand. Jeyne thinks it’s a romantic match: Lyanna and Rhaegar come again. Sansa knows enough from how her lord father scowls at the mention of Rhaegar’s name that it wasn’t the sort of love affair Jeyne imagines. Besides, the analogy is a false one. Sansa is nothing like Aunt Lyanna and there’s no reason to suspect Rhaegar’s bastard much takes after him either.

“He’s a  _prince_ ,” Jeyne insists.

“Not a real one. He’s only a bastard.”

“But he was legitimized. He’s Jon Targaryen.”

“Yes, but not really. The Council decreed he couldn’t ever inherit the throne. Not even should Aegon…” Sansa stops, not willing to speak the possibility of the princes’s demise aloud. Looking up from her embroidery, she gestures in what she hopes is a meaningful manner and wrinkles her nose. “They don’t consider him a real prince. They’re getting rid of him, sending him up North.”

“But surely you’ll go South. He’s the king’s son. They’ll want him in the capital sometimes.”

“No they won’t,” she says, thinking of her father’s words to her, when she asked why if they must be wed, she and Jon could not live in King’s Landing.

_I would never send you South. Your aunt went South and never came home. Your uncle and my father too. Be glad King Rhaegar wants Jon north of The Twins._

“But he’s bound to be handsome and a bastard prince’s kisses are like to be as sweet as a trueborn’s,” Jeyne says with a cheeky smile.

Sansa raises her brows, thinking of all the tales she’s heard whispered about the nature of bastards. “Bastards are base.”

There will be no King’s Landing and no beautiful prince. She knows this before Jon Targaryen ever rides through the gates of Winterfell, and she hates him for it.


	2. Chapter 2

Jon wasn’t surprised that King Rhaegar sent him to the North to live with and marry into his mother’s family. For the same reason he understood why his father wanted him gone, he didn’t have much hope that his mother’s family would be any happier to claim him. Bastards are never much wanted and royal bastards might be the least desired of the bunch. It’s as if the stink of potential usurpation and past indiscretions not his own hung over him, while he failed in almost every task set before him. Except fighting.

After years of the finest instruction, he’s more than passingly good at fighting, and it’s in the training yard that he first finds common ground with his cousins. And not just with the boys. Arya, the younger sister, is as eager to swing a sword as her littlest brother, Rickon, who is still young enough to hang about his mother’s skirts, when not chasing after his brothers. If Jon has his way, he’ll gift her a sword and let her slice away to her heart’s content once the keep in The Gift is his to do with as he pleases.

After being the unwanted bastard in the royal household, resented by the queen and bemoaned for his inadequacies by the king, the Stark family is a revelation. Warm and easy, it is a familial setting unlike what Jon experienced before. Almost without exception he was welcomed by them as kin. It isn’t only his cousins who are genial. Lord Stark embraces him as the father he wished the king could be and while Lady Catelyn hangs back, observing him with a cool detachment, she is not unkind.

This is his family. He even looks like them–Ned and Arya at least. He looks and feels as if he belongs here in the North. He finds himself wanting to be bonded to them by more than just blood. He would happily be wed to a daughter of Ned Stark, just so long as it was not Sansa.

He’s lived his whole life with a father and a brother to whom he couldn’t relate. They sang and composed poetry and played instruments, while he was all thumbs and splotchy ink smears. They were beautiful and refined, while he was sturdy and practical. He doesn’t think he’d like to spend the rest of his life faced with a similar incompatibility between he and his lady wife.

“Aren’t Northern women supposed to be…” Jon fishes for a word that won’t give insult to his cousin, his brows drawing together, as Sansa flounces past where he sits in the hall with Robb, her nose high in the air and her eyes pointedly not meeting his.

“Like Arya?” Robb supplies.

Jon shrugs, though he supposes that is what he means. Northern women are different from the perfumed ladies of the South. His mother resembled little Arya in spirit as much as appearance. Or so Lord Stark has told him. Never having been told much of anything about his mother, these small details are all he has to craft an image of her. Why could Sansa not be at least a little more like that?

“Arya’s much too young to wed,” Robb says, lifting a tankard of ale. “Truth be told, Mother is none too happy that Sansa will be wed so soon. There weren't any plans to send her away before the king wrote. So if you mean to speak with Father to alter the arrangement, I’m afraid you won’t have any success there.”

“Oh, no. I didn’t mean,” Jon stutters, feeling his face turn red, before Robb pounds him on the back.

“You’ll need to learn better how to take a needling being married to Sansa, cousin. She can be as tart as she is pretty,” Robb says from behind his tankard.

Sansa Stark is much prettier than he was led to believe any Northern girl could possibly be. She’s beautiful. When he dismounted that first day, feeling awkward and acting stilted, and she was brought forward to greet him, her coppery hair catching on the wind, he wondered if this was all some elaborate jape at his expense. Nice things were never meant for him.

“Your sister doesn’t like me.”

It might not be so obvious if he wasn’t embraced by the other members of the family, but he has been. The difference is glaring. She snickers behind her hand with the steward’s daughter, whenever he makes some misstep, and refuses to answer him in anything but clipped one word answers. They’re to be wed in a matter of days and he’s made no headway in getting to know the girl who will be his lady wife. Worse yet, from what he’s seen, he doesn’t think he cares to.

“Who knows what it is girls like. Sansa’s head is lost in songs.”

If that’s the case, Jon knows very well who she would swoon over, and he despises her for it.


	3. Chapter 3

Sansa has her fears about what being married to the bastard prince will mean for her, but as she lies alongside her very new, softly snoring lord husband, she muses not unhappily that the wedding night was not as terrible as she feared it might be. It was better than the wedding day itself, where Sansa felt that while every eye was on her, there was something damning about having none of Jon’s family present, and he looked even more glum than usual, hardly giving the appearance to her father’s bannermen that he was pleased to be marrying her.

Once they were alone, however, it was not so bad. He certainly did not act base and depraved as she feared he might. He was a little in his cups–as was she–and the wine must have loosened his lips. Instead of being awkward and dull, he whispered the most endearing things that made her smile and blush. He called her pretty. Twice. No, three times, and the last time he said it, he told her she was the prettiest thing he’d ever see, which was nice. She’s been called pretty before and in more poetic terms, but never with a man’s mouth at her neck and that had been rather more affecting than the usual compliment.

She shifts beneath the furs, rubbing her feet together.

All the liberties he took with her were preceded by a heady rush of “May I?”s and “Is this all right?”s. He said he didn’t want to hurt her. That was sweet too. And he didn’t. Not really, not like her septa warned her he would. She might feel sore tomorrow, but it’s nothing like the ache she gets in her belly when her moon’s blood comes. If anything, it was rather nice, the way he looked at her and touched her and Jeyne might not have been wrong about the kissing.

It was over fairly quickly once it really began in earnest. Which was for the best, because she was starting to feel breathless and squirmy, when he stopped moving above her and pressed kisses to her brow. Even now she feels like she can’t stop moving, can’t stop twisting against the linens in a vain attempt to escape her heated skin.

Instead she rolls on her side and flips the pillow over, seeking out a cooler side. As she settles, curling towards her husband to better inspect him in the dark, Jon’s eyes blink open. She pulls on the furs, bringing them higher on her breast, though she wants to kick free of them to feel the night air on her body.

“You’re awake,” he says, his voice thick with sleep.

Yes, sleep escaped her, though he fell into a heavy slumber, while her thighs were still drying with the evidence of their coupling.

She makes the most undignified sound, when his hand finds her hip and tugs her close, and then his mouth is on her again, lazier than before like he might kiss her all night. She’d let him; she knows with a melting sensation that she would let him do any number of things to her all night. Except without the pulse of wine in her veins, she can’t help but think of her family and the wedding guests and Jeyne and the servants. Everyone will laugh at them if they break their fast with darkened circles under their eyes. They’ll know Sansa has married the most depraved prince ever. They might even suspect that she likes it.

She pushes on his chest, sucking in air, as she regains some space from his soft lips and his warm breath. “Don’t spoil everything.”

“What?”

“Once was quite enough, thank you.”

The soft muzziness of sleep disappears from his face, as he pulls back his hand and runs it through the riot of his dark hair. “I hurt you, didn’t I?”

“No.” She sighs, wishing he could stop being sweet and go to sleep before the hearth, where she won’t have to accidentally bump into his solid bits all night. “It was nice enough.”

His mouth twists and something like determination sharpens his gaze. He wore this same steely look in the training yard, while facing Robb, when he lost a step or two only to gain it back threefold. Jeyne had remarked that the prince was awfully handsome when he was angry. Sansa couldn’t agree. He looked too much like her lord father and nothing like the Southron knights of her dreams.

“Let me try again.”

Sansa means to tell him no. In the morning, she’ll hate him for confusing her, for she means to cut him off with a pert reminder of the propriety that must be lacking in him after all. But then his hand is back at her hip and his hair is brushing her neck, as he mouths against her ear, “I’ll improve upon nice enough,” and all her words trail away into naught but a contended hum.


	4. Chapter 4

When Jon’s bride could barely smile on the day of their wedding and turned from him as quick as she could after he placed the Targaryen cloak over her shoulders, he knew in his gut that theirs would not be a happy match. He drank. Rather too much, particularly when he noticed that she too drank as if she could not bear it otherwise. But a strange thing happened as he emptied his cup twice and then a third time: he could not stop himself from admiring her in the gold embroidered gown brought by him north as a wedding present from his absent father. The bolder Jon’s gaze, the pinker she became and the more her eyes swept to the right, lashes fluttering in what would have been a coquettish gesture on a more practiced girl.

Jon did a good deal of noticing at King’s Landing, where there were plenty of willing girls to notice, but he was just as much a maid as his bride that first night. Now he understands why men do mad things in the name of women; he might even understand his father better. For it only took one night for Jon to forget that this was not a match of their own making and that he ought not to expect too much. Her coolness on the morrow was a sharp reminder.

Then again when she burst into tears as soon as they were alone in the round chamber they were to share at Queenscrown. When he attempted to take her in his arms to comfort her, she pushed him away, complaining about how he would be always under foot in this  _miserable ruin_.

He is accustomed to the Red Keep and Sansa to Winterfell. Neither of them were like to be awed by the condition or scope of their new home. Jon balked at the sight of Queenscrown rising up from the water. In its current dilapidated state, it is nothing more than an old tower made somewhat more impressive by its golden merlons. Its five floors consist of not twice that many drafty rooms, theirs the highest and the only that boasts balconies. The village is in ruins. There is much work to be done, but his first thought was not of the inevitable and clearly unwanted closeness these arrangements would require.  

It is hard to put the distance she desires between them, unless Jon rides out to survey the surrounding territory, which he finds himself doing with great regularity. Ned Stark hopes that the occupation of Queenscrown and eventually other holdfasts in The Gift will help protect against wildling raids, which have increased of late. Duty requires vigilance and consistent inspection, but it is also a convenient way to keep away from his dissatisfied lady wife.

One solution would be to ignore Sansa altogether, the way Jon’s father often ignores the queen, but that isn’t an aspect of the king’s behavior he wishes to emulate. Besides, he couldn’t ignore her if he tried. Day and night, he is consumed with thoughts every bit as sordid as Sansa imagines him to be, when she scolds him about propriety. More sordid no doubt, because the things he dreams of doing to her can’t possibly exist within the sheltered scope of her imagination.

Gods but he lives to have her pant against his neck and scrape her nails over his skin. In those moments, he forgets the rest of it: her sharp words and frosty glares, her palpable disappointment in him and the holdfast and this life she doesn’t want.

What they need is a distraction other than the flesh. Sitting upon their bed, stripped to the waist and waiting a little impatiently for Sansa to finish undressing, he broaches the subject he has turned over for some weeks in his mind.

“I think I’ll write your father and ask him if Arya might not join us here.”

“Why?” her voice calls out from behind her changing screen.

The screen she stands behind is made of a silk so thin that he can see her silhouette, one long leg bent at the knee, as she stops pulling at a stocking he wouldn’t mind removing himself. She ceases all movement, as he says, “It would be company for you, and I am fond of your sister.”

There is a blur behind the blue silk and then she rounds the screen, wearing only one woolen stocking and clutching a shift between her breasts. The shift dangles down, and though it covers the parts she must hope to conceal, Jon’s eye traces the curve of her thighs and hips before he ever sees her scowl.

“I know very well how fond you are of her, but if it is company for me that you want, I would prefer to have Jeyne Poole. She is my friend.”

“Arya is your sister.”

“We have hardly any room here,” she says, gesturing around at their chamber, “and you would fetch my little sister here to harass me? No.”

Standing up from the bed, he closes the distance between them. “What is wrong with you?”

Jon has daily proof of Sansa’s kindness to others. Their serving girl is nothing more than a slip of a girl, who seems as unhappy as Sansa to have been brought here, and Jon has seen Sansa braid the girl’s mouse brown hair as many times as the girl has styled her mistress’s, while recounting stories from the songs, as her nimble fingers work against the girl’s scalp. Their hound, a parting gift from his uncle, eats from Sansa’s hand at the table. She pampers the shaggy haired beast like a child to the point where Jon doesn’t believe he will ever manage to hunt with him. When Jon visits the closest village, she sends him with a basket full of fresh baked bread and hunks of cheese from their stocks. Her directions are clear: distribute the food to anyone who looks as if their belly is empty and then to the very young and the very old until everyone has had their fill.

Sansa can be gentle and thoughtful, and yet, she rejects her own sister and cannot bring herself to look on her husband with anything but disdain.

“Nothing is wrong with me, thank you.”

“She is your sister,” he repeats, lowering his voice lest he give in to his simmering temper.

“Would you care for Aegon to live here?” she retorts.

His hand closes over her own, where she clasps her shift, and he tips his head down until their foreheads nearly touch. “Would you? Would  _you_ prefer that?”

This is madness, he thinks, as they stumble back onto the bed, her shift thrown aside and his fingers digging into the plump roundness of her arse, as she bites at his lip, nipping like a shewolf. Only madness could make him forget his anger and burn with a different kind of fire. She is the loveliest, most maddening, contradictory girl, and all he wants is to be inside of her again and again.

The words escape him, confessing his need, as he draws her into his lap. “I need to be inside you.”

“Help me,” she says, fingers fumbling frantically with his laces.

Having freed himself from his breeches and shoved them down over his hips, he expects her to roll off him, so he might climb atop her as they always have done in the past. Instead, she slides down onto him, and one fantasy of his tortured mind is fulfilled, when she rocks above him with coppery hair trailing over her pink tipped breasts.

If they’ve argued at night, her practice is to put her back to him in the bed in silent refusal, and he has only to stare at the ceiling until sleep overwhelms him. A spat has never ended in her wet and whining his name. A spat has never ended in her biting at his earlobe the way he usually does hers. Or in her arching against him like a cat, while hissing, “Don’t be vile.”

He isn’t sure what is vile: his conjuring up the presence of his brother here in their chamber or his thumb rubbing circles in the slickness above where they meet, making her grow flush and tighten with a speed he did not know her capable of. It makes no difference. He has no intention of speaking Aegon’s name again. He wouldn’t stop touching her either, but as she begins to clench around him, she forces his hand away and collapses, riding out the rest of her pleasure against his chest.

With the pleasant weight of her, the soft press of her breasts, and the whole of her smooth body within reach of his wandering hands, Jon wants to stretch the crest out as he sometimes can to enjoy her longer. He grits his teeth, his hand pressing into the small of her back, holding her to him, willing his body to slow.

It’s different with her above. She might have controlled the pace before with him caught between her thighs, but now he feels unexpectedly protective of her limp form molded to his, curling around him and humming tuneless encouragement. They’ve done something new tonight, something she trusted him enough to try. His wife. His hips snap, thrusting into her, spilling into her with eyes screwed tight.

He huffs out a breath that was caught in his chest, letting her resettle herself against him in a sticky, wet slide that does not end with her rolling away. She tucks her head under his chin and her hand splays over his racing heart. He feels it, the gentleness that escapes them anywhere but here, and just as he couldn’t hold himself back, he knows this moment too will end too soon. In the morning she will be cross and he will feel embittered, and that is simply the way of things.


	5. Chapter 5

As punishment, Sansa meant to be aloof and distant, when Jon returned from the Wall. She had her pert replies prepared and practiced her snide looks before her mirror, so he would know exactly how little she thought of him. Then he came home so late and gave her such a weary, happy smile, when he stumbled into the solar, where she sat by candlelight double checking the notations in the ledger, that she exchanged her plans for something new.

Tonight she played the devoted lady wife, calling for a warm bath for Jon and for their supper to be brought to their chamber, envisioning a quiet, intimate meal together, where he might confess how dearly he missed her and she might even think to do the same. Given the hour, he didn’t dress after climbing from his bath and she joined him in his dishabille, which might account for why they didn’t get through much of their supper of roast quail and mushrooms before he lifted her up over his shoulder like a sack of flour and carried her to the bed, where he deposited her on its edge.

It is a night for new things, she thinks, her fingers slipping through his damp hair, hardly daring to look down at him, though she can feel his eyes on her, seeking her response. Her response is uncontrolled. Gulping for air and grabbing at the linens, her heels bump against his back, looking for purchase.

He’s never done this before–shouldered her legs apart and kissed up her legs until his mouth was  _there_. This is something else altogether, beyond the play of his callused fingers on her or the rub of their bodies. The drag and flick of his tongue is so intensely pleasurable that Sansa wonders that she never heard it whispered about. Every serving girl in the Seven Kingdoms should be tittering about how this makes the heart pound and the belly knot, and wives should never finish their mending in their rush to climb into bed.

It must be very, very wicked. Too wicked to name aloud. Jon is not always wicked, the way she feared he would be. The time they spend in their marriage bed is good. She never goes to bed anymore wiggling against the linens. Jon takes care of that restless feeling with ever increasing familiarity. Of course, sometimes he whispers things he ought not to, while he moves inside her. Things that turn her pink and make her arch up into him to draw him closer and deeper. It’s only after she has to bite her lip, thinking back on it.

This is worse than his filthy sweet compliments. It has to be wicked to make her babble yeses and ohs and please, Jon, please. She tugs his hair and the vibration of his groan goes right through her, and all she can do is cant her hips for more. It’s the more of his fingers sliding inside her that brings the words to the tip of her tongue she can’t speak for fear he won’t return them.

This is dangerous.

“Stop,” she croaks out, pushing his forehead away from herself with shaking hands.

His mouth parted in surprise, he sits back on his heels, as Sansa forces her shift back down over herself.

“Did it not feel good?” he asks, licking his lips as he runs the back of his hand along his jawline over the beard that has sprouted over the course of his journey.

Sansa likes his face clean shaven, but for the life of her she can’t remember why. She scrambles back in the bed away from him, so she doesn’t spread her legs wide again, inviting the rub of his beard and those lips to move upon her again.

Still kneeling like a supplicant with his hands braced on the bed, he watches her skittish movements. “I thought you… were close.”

So close. Her legs tremble, as she tucks them beneath the linens, and her traitorous heart is telling her to stretch out a hand to him and pull him over her.

“I don’t want that. I don’t want any of  _that_ ,” she says, jerking the linens up to her waist.

“I see,” he says, brushing off his knees as he comes to his feet. “Did you not miss me at all then?”

“You are the one who left me.”

She tossed every night with the spot next to her empty and cold, but she won’t betray herself, when he thought nothing of leaving her all alone in this dreadful holdfast.

Having kept his intentions entirely to himself, he announced he was going away with only two days to spare. She paid him back with silence, which either he didn’t notice or didn’t care about, for he never asked how he had given offense or sought her wifely affection before he disappeared for more than a moon. Perhaps other delights beckoned more enticing than what a lady wife can offer. Such as eager women, who think nothing of men’s mouths between their legs.

“Seven hells, Sansa. Duty demanded I go.”

“That sounds very important.”

Scrubbing his beard with unnecessary violence, he glowers at her from across the bed. “It was. Who do you think we pay our taxes to? The Lord Commander requested my presence.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know any of the particulars. You didn’t think to share them with me before you rode off.” Looking relieved to be rid of her, she remembers with a sniff.

“Since when have you been interested in my duties?”

He reaches behind himself, fisting his shift between his shoulder blades, and Sansa looks away, feigning interest in the pewter pitcher beside the bed. She won’t be distracted by the flat planes of his chest and dark trail of hair she found disappointing at first, thinking handsome boys were all smooth and golden haired.

“I don’t care who called you. You’re a prince. You needn’t scramble to answer like a lordling.”

The bed dips beneath his weight. “Oh, I’m a prince now, am I?”

His retort twinges her conscience. She only ever called him a bastard prince to Jeyne before they wed, and even then it was wrong to speak ill of her betrothed. “Of course you are,” she says, knitting her hands in her lap.

“Well, this prince was needed at Castle Black. Lord Commander Mormont fears the wildlings are planning to mount an organized attack on the Wall.”

Sansa’s stomach swoops. She doesn’t like to think of the wildlings, though it is their boldness that condemned her and Jon to this abandoned Northern holdfast. The wildlings steal anything of value they come upon, including women. Queenscrown doesn’t have an impressive set of walls or dozens of men at arms. “Are we safe?”

Jon covers her hands with his and squeezes. “I’ll keep you safe no matter what.”

His soft reassurance is just what a lord husband ought to promise his lady wife. It almost mollifies her, but as he toys with her hands, tracing the rise and fall of her knuckles with his index finger, she can’t help thinking of Jon touching some other girl, running his warm hands along the inside of some raven haired beauty’s thigh before setting his mouth upon her. Something oily slithers in her belly.

Pulling her hands free of him, she makes a great show of fluffing her already fluffed pillow. “Next you run off to the Wall, give me more notice of your leaving,” she says with a punch to the down.

“All right,” he says on a sigh, as they settle into their respective places in the bed.

Their shoulders touch, and she wants to turn into him as much as she wants to strike his chest with her fist. “And don’t come back thinking you can introduce into our bed things you have learned there. It isn’t decent.”

He rolls towards her, his mouth twisting in what looks like amusement, which only makes the spark in her chest flare hotter. “Practice your filthy acts elsewhere.”

“Sansa, you do know there are no women at the Wall. And even if there were, you are the only one I  _practice_ on.” He catches her chin in his hand, smudging her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “You’re the only one I’ve ever practiced on.”

She wrinkles her nose. Throwing her words back at her like that feels like teasing, and while she put up with teasing from Robb, it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing a husband should do.

“You never kissed me there before,” she says, her legs involuntarily rubbing together, where the wetness still pools.

“In my head I have.”

Sansa twists, putting her back to him so he won’t see. Her nostrils flare and her breath comes quick, thinking of him there again between her legs, his grey eyes looking up at her and his fingers sunk into the flesh of her thighs.

The levity is gone from his voice, when he huffs at her. “I’m sorry if that offends you.”

Though it makes her blush to know he pictures them together like that, she’s not sure it can rightly offend her, when she’s done much the same, remembering his touch and itching to imitate it in his absence. Maybe she’s depraved, but perhaps if he was not off taking pleasure in someone else while she was thinking of him, it is not so very bad.

“The only one?” she asks with her mouth half hidden in the pillow.

“Yes. I know what it is to be a bastard.”

It would be sweet if he said his heart and body belonged only to her. That’s what the heroes in the songs would say. But marriage is not like the songs. At least theirs is not.

Closing her eyes, she wills herself not to dwell on her disappointment. While she can ignore his petulance, Sansa finds it hard to ignore anyone’s sadness, and sadness is what she heard in his soft confession. She flips over, curling into him the way she wanted to from the start.

“I’m sorry, Jon.” What would he think of her if he knew she cast him as the bastard prince? Or that she thought less of him for something he could not help at all?

His shrug would unsettle her from her place against his chest if he did not wrap an arm around her back. “I was carried away seeing you again. If you didn’t like what I did, I won’t do it again.”

So what if he is a bastard with terrible, dangerous ideas about what to do to her in their bed? She is just as bad, when she hitches her leg over his thigh to relieve the ache against the solidness of his muscle and the scratch of his hair. And while it might not be the love found in songs that keeps him from wandering from her bed, he is true to her nonetheless.

“Did you like it?” she asks, her hand skating over him.

He’s hard and hot under her hand, and though he doesn’t open his mouth, she knows his answer.

“I didn’t _not_ like it,” she says. “I could  _grow_ to like it if you wish to practice on me.”

“Let me,” he begins to say, but she stops him, rising up on one arm to hover over him.

“A woman can do something like that.” Her hand dips beneath his smallclothes to grasp him. “With her mouth,” she adds, as he thrusts into her loose grip.

Their eyes meet in the still mostly lit chamber, and she sees something in his gaze she only ever glimpses when they are alone like this. Something more than naked want. Something vulnerable Sansa doesn’t know how to name.

“Is that right, Princess?”

Her hand runs the length of him, firm and smooth the way she wanted a boy to feel. “I do know  _some_ things.”


	6. Chapter 6

It makes no sense. Knowing how Sansa hated Queenscrown from the moment it came into view, Jon assumed she would be happy to return to Winterfell. Instead, she pouts through meals, snaps at him in the solar, and flounces from every room they occupy together. This is the last night they will spend in Queenscrown before traveling for Winterfell, the last time they sleep atop a feather mattress tick and not some miserable cot, and yet, she insists on giving him the silent treatment, punctuated only by the heavy sighs that accompany her flopping from side to side.

“You confound me,” he says, crossing his arms over the furs. “You’ve gotten your way, but you’re acting like a petulant child.”

Her head turns sharply towards him. “I am not a child. I am your  _wife_. Or have you forgotten?”

“Forget? With you fussing beside me, when we could be getting much needed rest?”

“Rest?” she parrots back, her voice strained and high, as she pushes up in the bed and fists his shift just below the neck. “I don’t think so, lord husband. Not when you have a duty to perform.”

“A duty?” he grunts out as she forces him upright to the sound of popping seams.

“That’s the only thing you understand, isn’t it?” she demands, as his head clears the shift. She didn’t pull it off in the way he would. Reaching up, he rubs one ear, thankful he didn’t lose it to her jerky rage. “Duty over everything else.”

“This is not a duty to me.” He takes the balled up shift from her hands and tosses it aside. “This has never been a duty to me.”

He bends to kiss her, one of the hurried, needy kisses that do well to sooth both their tempers, but she stops him, holding his shoulders back from her with stiffly locked arms. He wants to scream. She wants him; she doesn’t. She pulls him close; she pushes him away. She hates this tower; she doesn’t want to leave it. She is a senseless, maddening, infuriating woman, and he wants to be inside her, so his last memories of her are not of a face flushed with fury but pleasure.

“What is it then, husband?”

“A bloody pleasure,” he retorts, picking her up and dropping her back into the soft fullness of their mattress. “A bloody pleasure neither of us can enjoy if you insist on being endlessly difficult.”

“Better difficult than unfeeling,” she says, wriggling free of her shift.

“I feel plenty.”

Including the bite she takes of his shoulder, when he kisses beneath her ear, and the scratches she marks along his back, as he kisses her rosy breasts until they’re hard against his tongue. She sustains her ire far longer than usual, only softening to his touch, when he makes a path down her body, and her frustrated noises turn feline, while her fingers card his hair. She feels plenty too. He makes sure of it.

She’s grown braver, his pretty wife, more demanding about what she likes and wants, and he likes it. Normally he would heed her panted instruction, but tonight he delays obedience. Sliding in and out of her as slowly as he can stand it, he suspends both their peaks, though she kicks at his back with her heels, commanding him to go faster in a voice louder than she will normally allow in their chamber, for fear a servant below will hear.

The pace not only extends but magnifies this primal thing they perfect. The whole tower must hear when she arches up into him, her head thrown back and her hand reaching for the carved headboard, as pleasure draws a straggled cry from her white throat.

He wouldn’t have made it this far without spilling inside her, when first they were wed. From the moment he knew her like this, her smallest responses to him burned him hot and fast. Nor did he know a woman could come apart again and again if you had the patience. He knows better, he does better, focusing his thoughts on the details of packing as a distraction to the slick pull of her cunt and the rub of her breasts against his chest, encouraging one more, shuddering peak from his wife.

Only then does he give in to his own need and the rhythm that tightens his belly, making his world narrow to naught but his cock and her lips pressed hard to his. For a moment, in a rush of blood and energy and muscle shaking satisfaction, everything becomes clear, including the beautiful woman beneath him. Her especially. Remove her from his world, and the rest of it would all cease to make sense.

He hasn’t yet opened his eyes, when she shoves his chest. He feels it in a far off way, as he crumples alongside her, face down in the pillow.

“You’ll miss  _that_ , I wager,” she says.

Jon swallows hard and forces his eyes back open. “What’s this now?”

“I hope you go to bed regretful and cold every night at the Wall.”

Usually their problems can be at least temporarily mended in their marriage bed. Not tonight. She means to keep up this absurd sulk, he realizes, pressing his face hard into the pillow in hopes that it might swallow him up.

Jon didn’t hope for tears from his wife. She has grown less given to tears since they first arrived here, and he admires the increased steeliness in her as much as he likes her kindness. But by sending her to be with her family, he hoped to eliminate the unhappiness she expressed in the past, when duty required that he leave her behind for more than a few days.

This will be no five day journey. It is not merely free folk who trouble the Wall. A darker, more ominous threat looms, and Lord Commander Mormont needs him. The South remains blind to the threat, but the North does not. He will always answer that call, the same as Robb Stark, Sansa’s brother, heeds it, and they will fight side by side as brothers.

Is it too much to ask that his wife take pride in that fact?

He rolls onto his back with a sigh. “Thank you for that, Sansa. I will no doubt be very cold and very lonely.”

“It’s all you deserve, sending your wife packing like so much baggage.”

“I am doing it for you,” he says with a frustrated gesture. “I could leave you here and head straight for the Wall, but you dislike being alone.” He is returning her to the family she never wanted to leave. At least not so as to be his lady wife in this ancient tower.

“You don’t know anything.”

“Is that so? I know you hate it here.”

“It’s where you and I have made our life together.”

“And you hated me from the first as well.”

“I was… disappointed.”

It smarts to hear it. A silly, boyish part of him wouldn’t mind if she confessed to having secretly admired him. For thinking him handsome and daydreaming about the day they’d be wed.

It shouldn’t bother him to hear the truth, for he knew she was disappointed, when he draped his cloak over her shoulders; and he was disappointed in her too. He thought a wife who shared his interests would be preferable to a proper little lady like Sansa. Someone with the spirit of his sister and the sturdy practicality of a Northerner. Someone who wouldn’t think him deficient for possessing no skill at the harp or composing lines.

Sansa might still like a lord husband who could pen poems in her honor or play along to her favorite songs. Just as Jon wouldn’t mind a wife that rode out with him. But he would not trade his wife for another.

Her habits are different from his, but they need not be similar to be complementary. While she will never spar with him, she mends his tunics and breeches after he rends them training. When she is not cross with him, she arranges his favorite meals to be served at supper and cuts his hair when it grows too shaggy. If the gods give them babes, she will be the sort of mother he wished for as a child, a fact he spends an embarrassing amount of time thinking about, when he should be contemplating defenses and stores.

Her domestic attentions have become as welcome to him as her touch here in their bed, but her value extends well beyond these things. She is bright and better at diplomacy than he is. That she questions his decisions has saved him from many a misstep, as he navigated becoming his own man. He has learned to rely on her in the trickiest of spots. She can do with a smile what his awkward fumbling can not, and sometimes those smiles are for him. They’re a balance to his solemnity.

People like him better because of her. He likes himself better. Shame his father will never see the change in him.

“You would get along with my father. He found me to be just as much a disappointment as you do.”

“Then he’s an idiot too.” It’s not quite treason, but for Sansa it’s shockingly disrespectful, and he looks out of the corner of his eye at her to gauge whether she means it as some strange jest. “It was no one’s fault but the king’s that he fathered a bastard. He might have married my aunt and not dishonored her.”

She isn’t jesting. Jon frowns. She’s defending him or the mother he never met, against his father. Or something very much like that.

“It wasn’t my being a bastard that bothered him.” It was everyone else that despised him for it, and while he has less reason to think of his parentage in the North, he will never fully escape it. “My failures made me an unworthy dragon, a poor fit for his sought after prophecy.” The dragon is to have three heads, two to accompany the great prince, but what kind of sorry companion is Jon to his silver haired brother?

“That’s nonsense. You’re good at everything you do, save dancing.”

“You’ve lost your mind, I think,” he says, affection swelling his chest. He has a great number of deficiencies, some of which he never thought to count until his wife pointed them out to him. He tilts his head to press a kiss to her head, where a crown would not be out of place.

“Jon,” she says, a whine creeping into her voice, as she curls into him, long and soft in a multitude of pleasant places. “Don’t send me away. The Wall is too far from Winterfell. I’ll never see you.”

His hand slides over her thick hair, down her back, to the curve of her hip he’s come to think of as his, though she is so thoroughly her own creature. He will miss this, being naked as his name day beneath the furs with her body flush against his. He will miss her counsel and touch and sleepy eyed face in the morning, and with no idea of when or if he’ll manage to return, this is a parting he does not relish. But there is no question of keeping her close.

“You’re not safe here, my love.” He can’t leave her vulnerable at Queenscrown. It would be worse than a distraction, thinking some harm might come to her, while he is unable to protect her. He would forever blame himself if something befell her.

“Don’t tease,” she says, digging her knuckle between his ribs, “calling me that.”

“It’s not teasing if I mean it.” He’s not sure when it happened, but he is hopelessly in love with his wife. She hides her face in his shoulder. The puff of her breath raises goosebumps along his sweaty skin. Proof of his exertions, whatever they might be, once offended her delicate sensibilities. “Is that proper? My loving you?”

Now he’s teasing, but he feels her smile, and he knows he’s done right to tell her.

“Only if you come back for me, so I might show you how very proper it is.”

Given what he might face, it’s mad to promise her anything. But he is a dragon as much as he is wolf, and there is a tradition of madness that duty calls him to maintain. “I will. I swear it.”


End file.
